None of you guys have ever tried this??? With training aircraft like the B47 we'd do lots of simulated tail-rotor failures from 500' by jamming in full right pedal, pointing out the pedal position was not going to move again until on the ground, and then slowing down until keel effect was lost and it snapped around. Let it go around a time or two (any more and the student would lose horizontal plane reference and bad things would happen) then roll throttle off to stop rotation, bottom collective to hang onto rpm, and pitch for some airspeed. From 500' you'd get about 10 mph per 100, so you'd have enough to flare and skid it on full-auto. It would veer a little to the right but not bad, at which point you'd point out to the student that the pedals hadn't moved. Most pedal goes to counter right yaw, in an auto it's almost full right. 212's weren't much different, but all this stuff used collective throttles.
Who knows whether a sim is going to replicate reality or not. You have pilots chatting with programmers on what they think will happen, nobody has hard data. And after all, the only failure we're concerned about now is an engine failure (but only if you have two), anything else is as JimL describes beyond the probability where it is worthy of much attention. On the S76 we tried jamming right pedal in a hover and having the copilot chopping throttles but it didn't work all that well with experienced trainers and there was low probability of success with a plebeian crew, hence the new world order of just lowering collective. We never did zero airspeed simulated by right pedal tail rotor failures at altitude either, too hard. So we always trained with enough speed for keel effect where the lowering of collective had some merit an gave time to bring the throttles back.
Discussions on takeoff profiles again, comparing the statistical exposure time. Jungle ops we started out verticalling some distance above the canopy before transitioning to forward flight, but gave up on that due to what felt like a lifetime of exposure for that extra hundred feet and the reality that you weren't going to find your way back down that keyhole anyway. Judgement call based on wide consideration of environmental factors, something we can't do anymore - each specific case has to be in the RFM.
In this one, I saw nothing wrong with Eric's departure profile. In the absence of any RFM or regulatory Class 1 guidance I would have flown the same. Raising the gear, I don't know if it had any significance or not. The S76 has a priority valve to deal with extra demand on hydraulics during gear retraction. The 139 deals with it by bolting on an extra hydraulic pump.